The Victorian Development of the Idea of "the Public Interest"

Dale H. Porter, Professor of History and Humanities, Western Michigan University

This passage has been excerpted from Dale H. Porter, The Thames Embankment:
Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London. Akron, Ohio: University
of Akron Press, 1998, which is reviewed
elsewhere in the Victorian WebGPL.

n
the Middle Ages, the public interest had been defined in terms of
the King's peace, a domain of law in which the ruler claimed the right to intervene
on behalf of the good of the realm and its subjects. Gradually, the Crown was
subjected to the rule of the law as interpreted by the courts, and, after 1688,
Parliament took over much of the royal claim. In the nineteenth century, three
developments precipitated new questions about the public interest. Rapid urbanization,
coupled with the invention of mass circulation newspapers, generated a sense
of community with often radical overtones. Unlike the eighteenth-century mob
agitation that supported John Wilkes and Henry Hunt, however, this new community
image was identified with local parishes, boroughs, neighborhoods — in other
words, urban territory. Second, turnpike and railway 1egislation and the various
reform acts passed by Parliament (especially the Factory Acts, the Poor
Law administration, and the Municipal Corporations
Act of 1835) highlighted tensions between local authorities and royal government.
Finally, public construction projects brought subjects and rulers face to face
with the question, whose property is public property? Political authorities
obtained the legal right to confiscate real estate and buildings that stood
in the way of approved projects, so long as the owners were properly compensated.
But who had a vested interest in the new landscape and structures that replaced
them? The local vestry or borough council? The central government? An autonomous
"improvement commission"? Residents? In the case of the Thames Embankment, some
fifty-two acres of prime real estate were literally dredged out of the river
in the heart of London. They were authorized by Parliament and the Treasury,
claimed by both the Crown and the City Corporation of London under ancient law,
built under the auspices of the recently created Metropolitan Board of Works,
defended by aristocratic residents — and requisitioned, in the end, by the
people of London for their own use. This new concept of public property was
to have important consequences for future environmental issues. To cite a single
instance, by the end of its institutional life, in 1889, the Metropolitan Board
of Works came to manage over 2,600 acres of parks and commons, most of them
taken over from private landowners as the metropolis swallowed up the manors
and villages. [16]